Football – Rewirehttps://rewire.news
News, commentary, analysis and investigative reporting on reproductive and sexual health, rights and justice issues.Mon, 16 Oct 2017 21:21:03 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.8.2GOP Lawmaker: Defund NFL Team Over Player Protestshttps://rewire.news/article/2017/09/26/gop-lawmaker-defund-nfl-team-player-protests/
Tue, 26 Sep 2017 14:40:58 +0000https://rewire.news/?post_type=article&p=109070More than 200 NFL players on 19 teams linked arms, knelt, or sat out the national anthem Sunday after President Trump blasted players who took a knee to protest police brutality against people of color.

]]>A Louisiana Republican state legislator wants to cut state funding for the New Orleans Saints after some of its members joined more than 200 National Football League players to sit out the national anthem before their Sunday game against the Carolina Panthers.

“The very reason (the Saints) have the privilege and opportunity to play professional football while being paid millions is because someone in uniform died protecting their right to do so. It is a disgrace to the men and women of this nation and state who have sacrificed so much,” state Rep. Kenny Havard (R-St. Francisville) said in a statement.

Havard said people should exercise free speech rights on their own time and “not at a taxpayer subsidized sporting event.”

Public funding and tax breaks make up about $165 million of the Saints’ $1.5 billion value, according to a 2016 Times-Picayune estimate. Tom Benson, Louisiana’s richest resident with a $2.2 billion fortune, owns the Saints and the NBA’s Pelicans, both of which benefit from taxpayer money.

Greg Bensel, senior vice president of communications for the two organizations, declined to comment Monday on Havard’s threat.

More than 200 NFL players on 19 teams linked arms, knelt, or sat out the national anthem Sunday after President Trump blasted players who took a knee, calling them a “son of a bitch,” and said the team owners, many of whom he said are his friends, should fire them for protesting racial injustice and police brutality against people of color.

Trump recently rescinded a White House invitation for the NBA’s Golden State Warriors player Stephen Curry after Curry said he would not come to the White House, as championship teams typically do. In response, the Warriors decided as a team not to attend and LeBron James, the Cleveland Cavaliers superstar, called Trump “a bum.”

But race is the reason that sparked these protests since former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick refused to stand for the national anthem last year to draw attention to the police brutality Black people face in the United States. No NFL team has signed Kaepernick, a one-time Super Bowl quarterback, since the end of the 2016 season.

In an op-ed for the New York Times, Eric Reid, a former teammate of Kaepernick’s, defended their act of civil disobedience. “We chose to kneel because it’s a respectful gesture. I remember thinking our posture was like a flag flown at half-mast to mark a tragedy,” he wrote on Monday.

Athletes standing for the anthem is a fairly recent phenomenon. Players were “encouraged but not required to stand” according to the NFL, and many of them waited it out in the locker room prior to 2009, Comcast Sportsnet New England reported in the aftermath of the Kaepernick controversy.

A 2015 PBS investigation revealed that the Department of Defense paid the NFL more than $5 million between between 2011 to 2014 to stage pro-military propaganda.

Hugely profitable corporations that receive millions in taxpayer funds and subsidies, the NFL and the NBA are made up of mostly Black players. The teams are owned largely by white business tycoons. Michael Jordan is the only black owner of an NBA team. Shad Khan, who gave $1 million to Trump’s inaugural committee, is the only Muslim owner in the major American professional sports.

Running campaigns in support of Black athletes, Color Of Change, the nation’s largest online racial justice organization, condemned Trump’s tirade against athletes taking a knee during the national anthem to draw attention to systemic racial injustice.

“Almost every NFL owner is white. Nearly 70 perfect of players are Black. Yet for Donald Trump this power imbalance is not enough—he wants to be sure that players who exercise their right to protest social injustice can be fired with impunity. This is what it means to advance a white supremacist worldview,” Color of Change Executive Director Rashad Robinson said in a statement. “Trump’s comments are not limited to Colin Kaepernick, who has already been blackballed by the NFL. They are not even limited to to all those NFL players who have joined Kaepernick’s protest while still in the league, putting their careers on the line by speaking out against injustice. Rather, they reflect a wider view of sports in which Black people serve for the pleasure of white people, and any who deviate that—such as Stephen Curry and Jemele Hill—will be ruthlessly silenced.”

“The First Amendment is a cornerstone of our democracy and any attempts to suppress or intimidate free speech have no place in public discourse,” she added.

As Warriors head coach Steve Kerr pointed out last weekend, “No matter how many times a football player says, ‘I honor our military, but I’m protesting police brutality and racial inequality,’ it doesn’t matter. Nationalists are saying, ‘You’re disrespecting our flag.’ Well, you know what else is disrespectful to our flag? Racism.”

]]>Lawsuit: University of Colorado Boulder Protects Football Money Over Abuse Survivorshttps://rewire.news/article/2017/09/06/university-of-colorado-protects-football-money-over-survivors/
Wed, 06 Sep 2017 22:56:31 +0000https://rewire.news/?post_type=article&p=108345A lawsuit filed in federal court demands University of Colorado Boulder officials and coaching staff answer for allegedly protecting a football coach over the safety of his partner.

]]>In December 2016, Pamela Fine was desperate. Her then-romantic partner, a member of the University of Colorado Boulder football coaching staff, Joe Tumpkin, had been viciously abusing her to the point that she feared for her safety and others’. She thought he needed help dealing with mental health and substance abuse issues, but she didn’t want to get authorities involved. Assuming his closest friends and colleagues would feel the same way, she reached out to other members of the university’s football coaching staff.

But as it turned out, the only thing they were interested in was protecting was the CUfootball program, and the potential personal and professional economic windfall the upcoming Alamo Bowl would return.

These are all the allegations filed in a lawsuit Wednesday by Fine, whose attorney argues not just that Tumpkin abused her, but that the university and its football coaching leadership, having been informed about the alleged abuse, put the football program above their legal obligations.

Fine’s complaint names Tumpkin; head men’s football coach Mike MacIntyre; Athletic Director Rick George; Chancellor Philip DiStefano; and President Bruce Benson as defendants. All of these individuals, the lawsuit alleges, knew about illegal conduct, failed to observe policies for responding to it, and actively tried to cover it up.

The lawsuit does not name as defends the university or its board of regents directly because, according to the complaint, Colorado immunity laws prevent them from being sued directly for their role in the Tumpkin case.

“On December 9, 2016, when I reached out to Coach MacIntyre, it was out of fear for Joe, myself, other women, the players, and the community of Boulder because Joe had become very dangerous to himself and others,” Fine said in a statement following the filing of the lawsuit. “I didn’t want to publicly hurt Joe, the coaching staff and their wives, and all the Colorado football players who had worked so hard to get to their first bowl game. I wanted to protect my abuser and the people around him. I finally picked up the phone to tell my truth to a trusted leader whom I believed would help Joe,” said Fine.

Once Tumpkin’s bosses knew of the abuse allegations, they had a legal obligation to—at a minimum—report those allegations to the university’s Title IX coordinator. They also should have taken appropriate action like contacting law enforcement, given the liability to the university Tumpkin’s alleged violence and substance abuse posed and the nature of Fine’s allegations. Fine’s lawsuit is, in effect, a negligence and personal injury claim noting their failure to do so.

The lawsuit claims individuals like MacIntyre, the head coach of the university’s men’s football team, owe Fine a basic duty of care to make sure that at a minimum, one of their employees was not a danger to others or himself. MacIntyre was the person Fine says she reached out to directly via cell phone and Facebook to get Tumpkin help. According to the complaint, one call lasted at least 30 minutes.

He would, according to the complaint, eventually block Fine’s number from his cell phone without telling her. Fine alleges she sent numerous messages asking for help for Tumpkin without knowing MacIntyre had no interest in receiving them.

Instead, MacIntyre contacted outside counsel who had previously defended multiple Colorado student athletes accused of Title IX violations, including those involving sexual assault. According to the complaint, MacIntyre then reached out to Tumpkin directly to let him know about Fine’s allegations.

Around December 12 or 13, 2016, Fine says MacIntyre gave Tumpkin the contact information for Jon Banashek, an additional attorney. The complaint characterizes Banashek as “a University booster and an attorney who routinely represents University student-athletes in legal matters involving violence, sexual assaults, and narcotics and alcohol-related violations.”

Fine, however, had not yet reported any abuse to law enforcement. She was still trying to seek help for Tumpkin.

According to the complaint, on December 13, Baneshek called Fine directly, offering her money to obtain post-traumatic stress disorder therapy and promising her an apology from Tumpkin. Banashek also asked Fine if she would notify him beforehand if she decided to report Tumpkin’s abuse to law enforcement. This behavior, if true, is ethically questionable at best: Banashek would have been testing the waters to see if Tumpkin and the university could buy Fine’s silence.

Fine alleges that Tumpkin’s lawyer called her again two days later to tell her “she had ‘a lot of people on pins and needles'” about whether she was going to report Tumpkin’s abuse to law enforcement. She says Banashek specifically identified Tumpkin, MacIntyre, and George as those people who wanted to resolve the matter without Fine going to police.

Meanwhile, the university was also hard at work apparently covering its tracks. By December 11, George had informed CU Boulder Chancellor DiStefano about the details of Fine’s allegations, according to the complaint. But, the complaint says, George failed to report the situation to anyone else, including the university’s Title IX coordinator.

DiStefano, it turns out, sits on the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s Board of Governors and serves on the committee that recently released the league’s newly adopted sexual violence policy. This policy directs just the kind of action DiStefano allegedly failed to take in Fine’s case; based on timing, it should have been discussed while the university was handling the Tumpkin allegations.

According to the complaint, about a week after MacIntyre learned of Tumpkin’s abuse of Fine, he, with the help of George, promoted Tumpkin to the role of defensive coordinator for the university’s Alamo Bowl Game. The complaint notes that a victory in the Bowl Game would have meant a lot of money to members of the athletic department and that it would have helped MacIntyre secure the Coach of the Year Award.

On December 19, Fine reported Tumpkin’s abuse to the Broomfield Police Department. On December 20, she sought and obtained a temporary restraining order.

According to the complaint, the athletic department knew of the protective order that same day. That order was made permanent in January.

Meanwhile, Chancellor DiStefano eventually did take some action. According to the complaint, sometime during the week of December 16, DiStefano informed University President Benson “about the issues raised by Tumpkin’s abuse” of Fine. Benson, who had to at least sign off on Tumpkin’s promotion, went ahead with it anyway. Then on December 28, the complaint says DiStefano informed university counsel Patrick O’Rourke about Tumpkin. Fine alleges that O’Rourke “did not address the situation or take responsibility for assuring that the University’s Title IX Coordinator and law enforcement authorities were addressing the issue properly or that Plaintiff and others in the University community were protected from Tumpkin.”

“O’Rourke did, however, discuss with DiStefano the fact that MacIntyre and George were considering permanently promoting Tumpkin and extending his contract,” the complaint continues.

According to Fine’s complaint, it wasn’t until January—and after Boulder’s newspaper the Daily Camera reached out to the university to react to Fine’s temporary protective order—that officials acted in any real capacity. On January 6, officials placed Tumpkin on temporary administrative leave. Nearly three weeks later, they asked for his resignation, reportedly including severance pay. Tumpkin was never actually fired.

On January 31, the Broomfield Police Department charged Tumpkin with five counts of felony assault, including assault with a deadly weapon, for his physical abuse of Fine. The Broomfield District Attorney’s office declined to comment to Rewire, citing the ongoing nature of the case.

The University of Colorado History of Title IX Non-Compliance

The University of Colorado Boulder has a long, troubled history with complying with Title IX, especially with regard to leaders of its collegiate football program. Fine’s case, while not a Title IX claim directly, suggests that the university prioritizes itself over rectifying a dangerous environment for women.

In 2002 the university faced a series of lawsuits alleging the administration failed to respond to sexual assault claims by students. Shortly after, Katie Hnida, the only woman to play on the University of Colorado Buffs football team, came forward with her own rape story and detailed the administration’s unwillingness to deal with what was very clearly an ingrained assault problem on campus. In response, then-head coach Gary Barnett told reporters that the problem really was that Hnida wasn’t any good at football.

Just before that, the university was placed under federal investigation for failing to adequately address the series of Title IX claims it continued to face. In 2015, around the time of Barnett’s re-hire and two years into the investigation, Chancellor Philip DiStefano declared the University was doing “a very good job” handling the Title IX claims against it.

Meanwhile, Fine’s case directly demands that a court decide whether university officials and coaching staff failed to meet basic standards of doing their jobs by waiting to act on their Tumpkin knowledge, due to the financial incentive NCAA bowl games bring universities. That financial incentive connection adds a new element to the ingrained culture of abuse that CU has allegedly allowed to fester. It also forces an answer to the question of which matters most to university officials like DiStefano—abuse survivors or the university’s football program.

Under the spotlight, the university eventually hired outside counsel in February to investigate the chronic and systemic failures in Fine’s case. And the report issued found plenty of fault.

But as in 2015, the institution doesn’t appear interested in taking any real responsibility for the kind of environment it promotes on campus and within its staff.

MacIntyre, George, and DiStefano received letters of reprimand from the university as well as directives to issue reforms and training on sexual misconduct, intimate partner violence, and their reporting requirements. Chancellor DiStefano agreed to take ten days of unpaid leave, and the university agreed to donate the salary that he otherwise would have earned during that period to “programs supporting victims of domestic or dating violence in the university community.” MacIntyre and George were both told to make a $100,000 donation to the same cause.

In January, MacIntyre signed a $16.5 million contract extension to continue as the university’s head football coach through the 2021 season.

According to the complaint, Benson was not held responsible for any inaction.

The university has not yet responded legally to Fine’s civil lawsuit. When asked for comment, university representative Ken McConnellogue replied via email, “The claims in the lawsuit are not well founded factually or legally and we will defend our employees aggressively.”

At this point, if Fine’s allegations are proven true, it seems that the university has little choice other than to clean house of any rot within its ranks.

]]>Jessica Luther Offers NCAA a New Playbook for ‘Unsportsmanlike Conduct’ in Debut Bookhttps://rewire.news/article/2016/08/26/jessica-luther-offers-ncaa-new-playbook-unsportsmanlike-conduct/
Fri, 26 Aug 2016 19:46:53 +0000http://rewire.news/?post_type=article&p=93594With students returning to campus and football season kicking off this week, investigative journalist Jessica Luther’s book Unsportsmanlike Conduct: College Football and the Politics of Rape, is arriving at a pivotal moment.

]]>Reporting on the epidemic of sexual assault on college campuses and in the sports world has exploded over the past few years, leading to heightened awareness and accountability. With 246 current investigations into Title IX violations at 195 institutions of higher education, incidents of gender-based violence are so visible it would be easy for the average bystander to experience topic fatigue and assume we’re well on our way to solving this problem, if they don’t still believe many of these cases are isolated incidents and not symptomatic of a larger issue.

A study by the Bureau of Justice Statistics reported on at Inside Higher Ed earlier this year indicates we have miles to go. On average, one-quarter of female seniors and 7 percent of male undergraduates say they have been sexually assaulted on campus with only 12.5 percent of the women who said they were raped reporting the assault to colleges or law enforcement. And in the college sports world, the incidents of sexual assault are even higher, with reporting more challenging and consequences nearly nonexistent.

For Unsportsmanlike Conduct, Luther has tracked incidents of sexual assault in sports across decades and in all corners of the country, creating a thorough account of how these cases are currently handled by college or university administrations, media, and the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA). She confirms trends and details toxic patterns, making it impossible for readers to brush off incidents as isolated and unrelated. Then, just when the systems that perpetuate the violence seem inevitable and unchallengeable, she brilliantly uses the imagery of the sport she has loved all her life to create a “new playbook” that could change not just collegiate football, but our entire culture.

Dave Zirin, editor of Edge of Sports Books and sports editor at The Nation, explains in the foreword for Unsportsmanlike Conduct why Luther’s reporting and playbook to solve the epidemic of sexual assault in college sports matters beyond those of us who are fans.

“We know … that on many campuses, sports are at the heart of campus life and athletes are deified, entitled campus leaders who have a tremendous amount of influence on their communities,” writes Zirin. “These heroes are more likely to commit and be charged with sexual assault. One study shows that college athletes make up 3.3 percent of male students, but 19 percent of those accused of sexual assault.”

We demand that male athletes exemplify a macho, hypersexualized, aggressive ideal of masculinity.It’s no surprise, then, that fostering that image often leads to their internalizing an entitlement to acting out sexual and often violent impulses.

As a lifelong college football fan and a survivor of multiple sexual assaults—including as an Elmhurst College student—I thought I was pretty in touch with this epidemic. I’ve written about rape culture in sports for Rewire and elsewhere, taking on the role of the frustrated fan who struggles with believing other survivors while wanting incidents involving my players and teams to not be true. But statistics like the one Zirin cited about the percentage of college athletes involved in sexual assault cases hit me hard every time; the problem is so much worse than I had imagined.

One aspect of the epidemic that stands out from Luther’s reporting in the book includes a report issued by the U.S. Senate in July 2014, titled “Sexual Violence on Campus: How Too Many Institutions Are Failing to Protect Students.” While, as Luther concedes, 36 percent of us assume athletes are given more slack, the percentage of universities that have explicitly separate procedures for athletes accused of sexual assault is staggering. According to the report, “many institutions also use different adjudication procedures for student athletes. More than 20% of institutions in the national sample give the athletic department oversight of sexual violence cases involving student athletes. Approximately 20% of the nation’s largest public institutions and 15% of the largest private institutions allow their athletic departments to oversee cases involving student athletes.”

Allowing entities with millions of dollars and in some cases national titles on the line to determine the guilt or innocence of the athletes on whom those dollars and titles hinge is indefensible.

But in Unsportsmanlike Conduct, Luther isn’t solely telling sports fans how bad things are. She’s also done the incredible emotional labor of building solutions that might give us back some of the joy we once had on game days.

“This is in fact more than a book; it is a tool to help crack the code of why these assaults keep happening,” wrote Zirin. “This will help athletic departments—if they are willing to listen—to cease being examples of what is wrong with university life and help make them the leaders they need to be in the push to stop the violence.”

I couldn’t agree more.

Luther’s research is exhaustive. Importantly, she takes time to incorporate the intersectional factors that affect college sports culture such as race and unpaid labor, along with the unstated truisms that white supremacy brings to collegiate sports when mixed with entrenched misogyny.

“In our society, there is a reason cases involving African American players garner more attention than those of white ones. We are trained to see black men as perpetrators who need to be punished and controlled by the state,” she writes. “We also believe women to be dramatic and/or liars when they share their experiences, especially their interactions with men.”

In just three sentences, Luther has laid the foundation for why college sports perpetuates existing tropes and is an arena almost designed to foster sexual assault.

“Who else would commit such a crime, if not young black men? Who else would lie about having sex after the fact, if not young women?” Luther writes.

She goes on to rhetorically shake her head at the way these uncomfortable truths go unexamined in our media and in attempts by the NCAA and other powerful entities to address sexual assault:

[I]t shouldn’t go without saying because, while we focus on the black-man-as-criminal and the woman-as-liar, what is lost is that most of the people who create and maintain the culture of college football are white men, from coaches to athletic directors, from university presidents to the media who cover the sport. And all those white men make a lot of money off the backs of the players and they have no problem hushing up the voices of mainly women when they feel those women could threaten their players, their game, and their money.

No one is safe from Luther’s warranted criticism in a system failing so flagrantly and publicly to prevent violence and support assault survivors. While taking care not to excuse individuals’ behavior, Luther spreads the blame beyond the assailants.

“Exploitation is inherent in the system of college athletics; the humanity of players themselves is often stripped away by this kind of sports culture,” she explains. “The stripping away of the humanity of a woman by a potential rapist is similar in many ways—though not directly parallel—to the dehumanization that takes place when university administrators, team owners, and league commissioners commodify the bodies of these players.”

How do we fix any of this? Luther starts her 13-play “How It Could Be” section with a change that would have made all the difference to me when I was assaulted on my campus almost 20 years ago: “Consent Is Cool; Get Some.”

She explains that she made this the first play because “we just don’t talk about it enough. Honestly, it’s hard to imagine that we could talk about it too much.” If we had talked about consent at all in an explicit way when I was in high school or college, I would have understood what happened to me wasn’t my fault and that it was something I could have reported.

As an inexperienced 20-year-old, the cultural expectation that boys push and girls say no for a while until they give in had a firm hold on me. It wasn’t just in Disney movies and romantic comedies, it was an undeniable current in the abstinence teaching at my church and in the “well, if you feel you can’t wait, we can talk about birth control” talk my mom gave me in junior high. There would be pressure I would need to resist, I was told; I was the gatekeeper and it would be my willpower alone that determined how far things went.

So, when a friend I had been involved with off and on walked me down the hall to my room after a party my junior year and didn’t take my initial “no” for an answer, I thought the whole thing was both my fault and no big deal. Had anyone at any point so much as insinuated that I had a right to expect my assailant to inquire about my interest and comfort rather than pushing until I tried unsuccessfully to squirm out from under his restraining hold on my wrists and legs, I would have had him—at the very least—removed from my dorm for my safety. And when he started showing up at my on-campus housing the following summer, I would have considered calling both security and the police to pursue a restraining order. Instead, I didn’t get that what happened was a violation that I shouldn’t have had to deal with.

It is in this chapter on consent that Luther outlines perhaps the most shocking trend she includes in the book: Roughly 40 percent of sexual assaults she’s encountered in her reporting on college football were perpetrated or witnessed by groups of players. When I read Luther’s reporting and analysis, I felt both sick to my stomach and incredibly lucky that my college assault had only one assailant.

Luther describes a sort of permission by participation—that it is ultimately easier to violate someone when others are also violating them, watching, recording, and/or encouraging the behavior. How, she asks, could a group of men collectively ignore cries of “No!” and signs that the victim is intoxicated or otherwise incapacitated?

“One answer can be that it was a gang rape and it is easier to continue a given behavior if people you are with are doing it too,” she writes. “One other answer is that we, as a society, have allowed the idea of consent to be murky for so long now that for people who want to violate it, they can excuse away in their minds any evidence that what is happening is nonconsensual. Both of these ideas are terrifying.”

I wholeheartedly endorse Luther’s analysis that the “burden for establishing consent cannot be on one person alone.” Our institutions, law enforcement, and individual members of society need to alter how we think about consent from a presumed yes until someone says no, to the philosophy of enthusiastic consent and uncoerced participation.

We are making some headway on consent in our broader culture, with campaigns like “It’s On Us” from the Obama administration and state-level laws on comprehensive sexual education requiring discussion of affirmative consent. Luther boils down what all of these efforts together should be working toward: “We should all do our absolute best to practice consent this way [i.e. enthusiastically and mutually], in order to be respectful to both ourselves and our partners.”

Hear, hear.

Some of Luther’s other plays are similar in their simplicity. For example, she calls for better enforcement of Title IX law by federalizing coordinators who investigate violations. What if those tasked with assessing compliance were appointed by the Department of Education, rather than the universities they’re investigating? Also, teams and universities should also be specific about the preventive education happening on their campuses; lip service isn’t even close to enough.

The new play of Luther’s that makes me the most hopeful is “Follow the Players.” There really are some players—Ohio State linebacker Jerome Baker, for example—who are actively working to change locker room culture. He was a prized recruit who leveraged his visibility by asking his high school teammates to sign a pledge to speak out against gendered violence and then setting up a seminar with another player for athletes near his hometown of Cleveland. Those players should be empowered by coaches and athletic departments to organize and implement programs nationwide that tackle toxic masculinity.

Luther goes on to call for people to actually get fired. It’s remarkable how rarely anyone in power is held accountable for anything when it comes to sexual assault on campuses. It’s unconscionable how much money—millions and millions and millions of dollars—athletic directors and coaches continue to make despite multiple players being reported for bad behavior.

She critiques bystander intervention by making the salient and often ignored point that “it doesn’t actually address the matter of getting perpetrators to, well, stop assaulting people.” According to the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act of 2013 as reported at Rewire in 2014, “Bystander intervention should teach people how to recognize threatening situations and safely intervene, but also to understand ‘institutional structures and cultural conditions that facilitate violence.’”

With three out of four victims knowing their assailant, expecting bystanders to know when intervention is even necessary seems challenging at best.

She also asks the NCAA to “just do something, anything, at this point, beyond empty words” and demands that sports media do better too. Commentators and columnists need to be educated on how trauma affects behavior and that just because a case gets dropped or isn’t prosecuted doesn’t mean there was a false report, Luther writes.

She further explains why it is critical that sports media specifically improve: “How the media address sexual assault has an impact on society at large because it is within sports media that we often talk about this particular issue.”

How our larger media is failing at covering sexual assault in our society, leaving the bulk of the work to sports media, is a topic for another book.

The conclusion to Unsportsmanlike Conduct left me feeling slightly less dread about this year’s season—a pretty remarkable feat in itself, given the past few years.

In “Courage Is Contagious,” Luther talks about her lifelong love of her alma mater, Florida State University, and how the allegations against Jameis Winston (now a highly paid, lauded professional quarterback) regarding a 2012 assault, rocked her.

“[P]art of me wishes I could watch the game detached from all of this. The FSU fan in me is desperate to feel the high of cheering on my team without the weight of knowing the cost of the system that creates football champions,” she writes. “I bleed garnet and gold, but that blood now flows into a brain that is no longer ignorant, nor blissful. And all of it together makes my heart hurt. It’s time to do something about that.”

As a fan of FSU rival Notre Dame, I have had a hard time watching my team as well. Luther details some of Notre Dame’s egregious actions and inactions over the past several years in the book; it would be hard to decide which school ranks lower in response to sexual assault.

I miss football. I miss being excited for Saturdays and being thankful that no matter where I’ve moved, my team has a major network television deal and enough of a national following to guarantee I get to see them play if I want to. I simply haven’t wanted to and the loss I have felt is real.

I am rooting for Luther’s new playbook. Hard. Like her, I can no longer “operate in some neutral space” where I separate on and off the field actions. I am with her when she says:

On a personal level, as a fan of the sport and an advocate for reducing and ending sexual violence, I need those new plays and I need them now. I need to know that the sport I love sees sexual assault and rape as unsportsmanlike conduct, as fundamentally opposite to the spirit of the game.

Now that I hold that playbook in my hands, I plan to demand that colleges, athletic departments, the NCAA, and my fellow fans utilize them. We can no longer say the problem is too big to solve.

]]>What the Dallas Cowboys’ Signing of a Man Found Guilty of Assault Says About the NFLhttps://rewire.news/article/2015/03/20/dallas-cowboys-signing-man-found-guilty-assault-says-nfl/
https://rewire.news/article/2015/03/20/dallas-cowboys-signing-man-found-guilty-assault-says-nfl/#respondFri, 20 Mar 2015 16:00:22 +0000http://rhrealitycheck.org/?p=55470The NFL and its teams seem to have no real plan to combat violence against women or enforce consequences against players who commit it.

In July 2014, a judge found then-Carolina Panther defensive end Greg Hardy guilty of assault and communicating threats against Nicole Holder, a woman he had dated. When she testified during that trial, she told the court a horrific account of the night of May 13, when, Holder said, Hardy picked her up and threw her multiple times (one time down onto a pile of loaded guns); dragged her by her hair; and ripped off her jewelry and flushed it down the toilet. At one point, Holder said, Hardy put his hands around her throat: “He looked me in my eyes and he told me he was going to kill me. I was so scared, I wanted to die. When he loosened his grip slightly, I said, ‘Just do it. Kill me.’” Another person in the house called the police, telling the dispatcher, “He’s beating her ass in there. Some girl’s getting her ass beat upstairs and I heard it. And I seen it. He is beating her ass right the fuck now.” Holder was scratched, bruised all over her body, and there was swelling on her arms and back.

Hardy was sentenced to 18 months’ probation. On Wednesday, the Dallas Cowboys signed him to a one-year contract.

Hardy’s attorney Chris Fialko said he’ll appeal and Hardy has asked for a jury trial in superior court. In North Carolina that means the terms of Hardy’s probation are on hold until the trial—so he’s free to travel with the team to training camp and compete in games.

And Carolina let him do both until September, when the angry public fervor over Ray Rice boiled over into large-scale awareness about Hardy’s case. He was then deactivated by the team and placed on National Football League Commissioner Roger Goodell’s exempt list, meaning that although he could not play and the team could replace him on the roster while his case was pending, he was still paid. In late February, the Panthers released him.

Between the original bench trial in which he was found guilty and the jury trial Fialko requested on appeal, the district attorney prosecuting the case says Hardy settled with Holder in a civil suit. When the DA tried to locate Holder to have her testify again for the jury trial, they could not. There is no public documentation of the settlement and so no knowledge of whether it included an agreement not to testify, but the prosecution expected her to do so in the jury trial. When the DA last talked to her in November, she told them she did not want to testify again. She “intentionally made herself unavailable to the State,” prosecutors said in February. The result was that all charges against Hardy were dismissed last month.

We still do not know (and likely never will) why Holder chose not to testify again. Both Travis Waldron at ThinkProgress and Aaron Gordon at Vice Sports have written thoughtful pieces about why victims of domestic violence are generally reluctant to testify—fear for their safety being the main reason. We know Hardy had threatened Holder, based on what she told the court when she testified at the original trial. “He had told me in past,” she said, “if I took food out of his family’s mouth he was going to kill me.”

Hardy himself has acknowledged that when angry, he can be terrifying. In February 2014, he described to Sports Illustrated what he’s like on the field when that happens:

Once you piss me off, I forget everything. Everything after that is the monster. I’m going to take you out. When you cross that line, I’m gonna take it to a place you’ve never seen before.

Holder, based on the threats she said Hardy made towards her, very possibly feared him and any possible retaliation. It’s also jarring to read Hardy’s quote knowing that the kind of behavior Holder would fear off the field is encouraged and praised on it.

Professional football is a business, players are employees, and Hardy is not guilty under the law. But he was convicted of both committing violence against Holder and threatening her. The case fell apart during the appeal process, during which it appears Hardy and Holder interacted, at least in civil court, and we know his history of threats against her. In the end, the NFL has the legal right to hire him. No one is actually disputing that. What is being disputed is whether the NFL has a larger obligation to the community it serves, and the NFL itself has been saying since September that it does.

Dallas signed Hardy to a one-year contract with a base salary of $750,000 and millions more in incentives that could total $13.1 million if he plays next season. As Jane McManus wrote at espnW, that might not happen. The NFL is still doing its own investigation; right now, Hardy is still on Goodell’s exempt list, and it’s unclear if he’ll ever actually play for the Cowboys. The league might actually punish Hardy in the end and keep him off the field. That he can be signed in the meantime, and that a team feels it is worth the possible financial risk or public relations mess still indicates that it is worth questioning how seriously teams are taking the NFL’s own stated obligations to respond to acts of violence committed by its players.

Professional football is an incredibly popular and lucrative business. In a society whose criminal justice system is better known for failing victims of domestic abuse and/or violence than helping them, we often turn to other powerful institutions to do the cultural work of holding abusers accountable. The NFL, holding a prominent place in our community, is one of those, especially at this moment in time. Since September, there has been a huge amount of scrutiny on the league about how it handles players (less, I’ll note, about how it handles owners) who commit violence against women.

And the NFL has responded—at least in appearance. In the fall, the NFL partnered with No More, a group whose sole task is to raise awareness about violence against women. Melissa McEwan and Lauren Chief Elk have been questioning No More’s work and efficacy since January 2014. Diana Moskovitz wrote a scathing piece for Deadspin about the relationship between the NFL and No More last month. Just this past weekend, Jane Randel, No More’s co-founder and one of four women the NFL hired in September to help overhaul the league’s policies regarding violence against women, spoke on a panel at South by Southwest on violence in sports. Ben Casselman of FiveThirtyEight was the moderator; he asked Randel point-blank “how she could be sure No More was making a difference and not just providing public relations cover for the NFL.” In short, Randel didn’t actually answer Casselman, instead answering her own question of “Why are you working with them” with “Would you rather everyone step back and not work with them?” This, itself, is a construction that makes it seem like there are only two options: no one work with them, or No More does. This answer was, in microcosm, a perfect example of why people are so frustrated with No More and the NFL’s inaction on this issue. Hardy signing with Dallas is yet more evidence that the NFL’s so-called commitment to combating violence against women is nothing more than lip service.

Perhaps the NFL will do the right thing here with Hardy, but it is hard to bet on that. From all we’ve seen so far, the NFL and its teams have no real plan to combat violence against women or enforce consequences against players who commit it. Should we prepare for Hardy showing up in a No More PSA?

Even if Hardy never dons a Cowboys jersey, it matters that the Cowboys made this move. In September 2014, responding to Goodell’s punishment of Ray Rice, Cowboys owner Jerry Jones said there was “a lack of tolerance” for “spousal abuse” in the NFL. This week, Jones released a statement after signing Hardy, writing, “Our organization understands the very serious nature of domestic violence in our society and in our league. We know that Greg has a firm understanding of those issues as well.”

How Dallas knows that about Hardy is unclear. From this very signing, there’s no indication that the Cowboys understand anything about the seriousness of the issue of domestic violence—or, more cynically, that they care. Certainly the team is not practicing intolerance of abuse. Mike Freeman, NFL national lead writer at Bleacher Report, wrote yesterday that by signing Hardy, “Dallas sold its soul to win.” And, Freeman argues, with Hardy they will win—because Hardy is very good at what he does.

That’s the point, though, isn’t it? That once more, the NFL and/or its teams have shown that what happens on the field matters more than what happens off it, and that violence on the field is acceptable even if it comes with that parallel behavior off the field.

Beyond all this, I’m especially saddened to see the Cowboys sign Hardy, because the team—and Dallas as a whole—have made positive moves in the past around this issue. In March 2013, I attended an anti-domestic violence rally in the city, at which multiple former and current Cowboys spoke to an audience of thousands about why it’s men who need to take the lead on ending this violence. (Rewire’s Andrea Grimes was also there and reported on it at the time.) For two years now, when I have been asked by media outlets about what teams can do to draw attention to this issue, to reach men, to be proactive instead of reactionary, and to partner with their local communities around this problem, I’ve mentioned this rally as a positive example. It will be harder to do that moving forward. I’m not sure that I will anymore.

The rally, along with the Dallas Men Against Abuse Campaign—which Cowboys players have also been involved in—have been important parts of Mike Rawlings’ tenure as mayor. As a result, Rawlings, who is currently running for re-election, has been part of major national discussions on the topic. Staying true to his message, Rawlings told the Dallas Morning News on Thursday, “I’m a big Cowboys fan. I love them to death and I want them to beat the Eagles every time they play. But at some point, being a sports fan gets trumped by being a father, husband, wanting to do what’s right for women, so this is not a good thing.”

About the rally, Andrea Grimes wrote in 2013:

Sportscaster Dale Hansen is something of a living legend in Dallas, where he’s been a nightly news staple for thirty years, building a reputation as a jokester, even a smart-ass. But he didn’t come to Saturday’s Dallas Men Against Abuse rally to talk Cowboys or make wisecracks about the Mavericks. He came to tell thousands of men what it was like growing up in an abusive home.

On Wednesday night, Hansen gave an impassioned televised speech to express his anger at the Cowboys’ decision to sign Hardy, noting that “now you can beat a woman and play with a star on your helmet.”

There’s a reason that when Rawlings decided he was going to try to end domestic violence in the ninth-largest city in the United States, he enlisted the help of not just athletes but of professional football players. They hold cultural capital, and our treatment and valorization of them reflects back at us our ideas about what it means to be a man and what behaviors we deem acceptable. Our treatment of them also then reveals which people we are willing to sacrifice in order to get the best of the sport on the field. (This is as true for off-the-field victims of their violence as it is about the brutal nature of the game for the players themselves.) This is why the Cowboys signing Hardy makes Dale Hansen mad, why Mike Rawlings says this isn’t a good thing, why Mike Freeman says the Cowboys have sold their souls, why people are so skeptical of the NFL’s relationship with No More (and with No More itself), and why we are constantly questioning the league’s commitment to their intolerance of men’s violence against women. Actions, as they say, speak louder than words.

]]>https://rewire.news/article/2015/03/20/dallas-cowboys-signing-man-found-guilty-assault-says-nfl/feed/0The Washington Football Team’s Name Feeds Into Violence Against Native Womenhttps://rewire.news/article/2015/01/13/washington-football-teams-name-feeds-violence-native-women/
https://rewire.news/article/2015/01/13/washington-football-teams-name-feeds-violence-native-women/#respondTue, 13 Jan 2015 19:50:04 +0000http://rhrealitycheck.org/?p=51889Native American women experience the highest rates of sexual assault in the country. Some of this is clearly the result of sexualizing and devaluing stereotypes white men are still taught about Native women—including Native mascotry.

]]>Native American women experience the highest rates of sexual assault in the United States. According to the Department of Justice, one in three Native women will be raped in her lifetime; Native women are 2.5 times more likely to be sexually assaulted than any other race. Nearly two-thirds of the time, white American men are the perpetrators of these assaults—Native women are the only group to be more likely to be victimized by someone not of their race.

Some of these issues are related to jurisdictional gaps on reservations, which the Violence Against Women Act of 2013 was meant to address (though it is still too early to determine its efficacy). But others are clearly the result of sexualizing and devaluing stereotypes white men in the United States still learn about Native women.

One of the most egregious and enduring depictions of this kind is Native mascotry, which the NFL still practices today. The Washington football team’s continued insistence on using the Redsk*ns as a team name continues to promote an idea that Native people’s bodies are inherently a matter of monetization and objectification.

This anti-Native rhetoric is nothing new: White Americans’ perception of the “dirtiness” of Native people goes back for centuries. This is made evident, for instance, in an 1885 ad for Ivory Soap, which reads:

We were once factious, fierce and wild,
In peaceful arts unreconciled
Our blankets smeared with grease and stains
From buffalo meat and settlers’ veins.
Through summer’s dust and heat content
From moon to moon unwashed we went,
But IVORY SOAP came like a ray
Of light across our darkened way

This also emerges in white Americans’ use of the word “redskin” as shorthand for referring to Native people as ignorant, violent, or otherwise inhuman.

For example, an October 8, 1879, Rocky Mountain News headline reads, “Merrit Meets the Enemy. Victory over our Frontier Foes. Thirty-Seven Redskins Sent to the Happy Hunting Grounds. The Indian Problem Reaching a Conclusion.” An article in the same publication from November 19, 1890, reads, “And excited by firewater they dug up their rusty hatchets and prepared for blood and thunder. ‘Ugh,’ said every greasy redskin.”

And in the 1940 movie Northwest Passage, the character Major Rogers, played by Spencer Tracy, urges his fellow soldiers to break into Abenaki homes and “find scalps” after telling them, in lurid detail, about how one of the Native men had supposedly slaughtered his brother in cold blood. Rogers also says to one of his men, “Good luck, get a redskin for me,” implying, again, that Native people are somehow not humans so much as trophies.

In fact, these historical media stereotypes cannot be divorced from the attacks on Native bodies through the sale of our ancestors’ body parts for real-life bounty—as seen, for instance, in this 1863 newspaper clipping promising the modern equivalent of $3,800 for “every red-skin sent to Purgatory”—and the cutting of body parts of Native men, women, and children for keepsakes by U.S. soldiers (particularly genitalia). And, in turn, this view of Native people as nothing more than body parts used for amusement or profit translates to the perception of Native women as inherently “rapeable.”

In her book Conquest, Andrea Smith, a Native American professor at University of California, Riverside, explains that the sexual violence against Native women is inextricable from the racism depicted in “redskin” stereotypes:

When a Native woman suffers abuse, this abuse is an attack on her identity as a woman and an attack on her identity as Native. The issues of colonization, race, and gender oppression cannot be separated. This fact explains why in my experience as a rape crisis counselor, every Native survivor I ever counseled said to me at one point, “I wish I was no longer Indian.”

Smith goes on to quote New York University Professors Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, who note that the “disappearance” of Indian people and the subsequent promotion of stereotypes about them—including those in Native mascotry—is not a benign phenomenon in American society. Rather, they write, it is “an ambivalently repressive mechanism.” Through mascotry and other stereotypes, they say, “Living Indians [are] induced to ‘play dead,’ as it were, in order to perform a narrative of manifest destiny in which their role, ultimately, was to disappear.”

Even after reading all this, you may still be asking yourself, “What does cheering for my favorite football team have to do with Native women being sexually assaulted at rates three times that of other American women of any race?” All you have to do is look at old footage of the “Redskinettes,” cheerleaders for the Washington Redsk*ns who wore black “squaw” braids and “Pocahottie” outfits—or the YouTube comments on that footage exclaiming at how “sexy” the costumes were. Or at the fans who come to games wearing Redface. Or the extremely insulting and threatening behavior Native women and children face from these same fans while protesting at games; at a recent Washington, D.C., protest, a fan made an offensive gesture at a Navajo mother, her sister, and her 6-year old child. Our organization, Eradicating Offensive Native Mascotry (EONM), has recorded further derogatory fan behavior at games, and feature it in our YouTube series “How NOT to be an NFL fan.” The practice of Native mascotry engenders hostility like this in fans.

All of these incidents are evidence of the ways white Americans reduce Native people to being inhuman by feeling entitled to buy, sell, and use their identity through mascotry as they see fit. As in the past, this often extends to justification for treating Native bodies as if they are disposable, which therefore suggests that raping and assaulting them is not a crime. And too frequently, the U.S. justice system reinforces that belief by not prosecuting the perpetrators of these atrocities.

Native Americans and Native American organizations like EONM, the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI), the American Indian Movement (AIM), the National Coalition Against Racism in Sports and Media, and many tribal councils have repeatedly called upon the NFL to ban Redface from their games and to stop using Native people as mascots. NCAI and AIM first made these calls in 1968—47 years ago. Studies done by Emory University’s Sports Marketing Analytics website found that NCAA teams who dropped their Indian mascots actually made money and enjoyed greater fan participation and identification one to two years afterward. This suggests there exists, even for the majority of non-Native Americans, a deep-seated unease with the mascotting of Native people. But this is not about money; it is about Native people’s lives, and how we are viewed and understood by other U.S. residents.

Repeatedly, we at EONM have cited studies that show the reduction in self-esteem Native people experience when exposed to Native mascots. Our population is already extremely vulnerable, with suicide rates, murder rates and sexual assault rates that are on average three times that of the every other racial group in the United States. Still, there has been little response from NFL officials acknowledging these facts.

This silence is even more striking when compared to the NFL’s response to domestic violence within the league. Although the actual policies are still lackluster in terms of execution, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell at least issued a statement in August saying:

The public response reinforced my belief that the NFL is held to a higher standard, and properly so. Much of the criticism stemmed from a fundamental recognition that the NFL is a leader, that we do stand for important values, and that we can project those values in ways that have a positive impact beyond professional football. We embrace this role and the responsibility that comes with it. We will listen openly, engage our critics constructively, and seek continuous improvement in everything we do. We will use this opportunity to create a positive outcome by promoting policies of respect for women both within and outside of the workplace. We will work with nationally recognized experts to ensure that the NFL has a model policy on domestic violence and sexual assault. We will invest time and resources in training, programs and services that will become part of our culture. And we will increase the sanctions imposed on NFL personnel who violate our policies.

In his resolution to enact policies of respect and progressivism, Goodell’s words mirror what Native people are asking for too. We hope he will recognize that parallel, and that he will eliminate the mascotting of Native people and the promotion of stereotypes—relics of American history we should be educated about but not participate blindly in.

NFL players, including some on the Redsk*ns, have already stood in solidarity with Ferguson protesters and with domestic violence survivors—a message arguably undermined by their sporting a mascot on their uniforms that Native people have asked them to stop wearing. We now ask them to stand with us and say not only #NotYourMascot but #StereotypesNoMore, with a nationwide campaign to ban Redface from stadiums. So far, only the San Francisco Giants have agreed to amend their dress code to forbid “culturally offensive attire” at games at AT&T Park. To draw attention to this action, we and other Native American and domestic violence activists will be protesting at the Super Bowl in Phoenix on February 1.

And we ask all Americans to join in, too. It is but one step in correcting outdated portrayals of Native people as simply “savage warriors” that needed to be conquered for civilization to take root. When you play out these fantasies on any given Sunday, you are breathing life into these stereotypes that hold Native people back, mask the modern lives of Native people all around you, marginalize yet another generation into obscurity, and leave all Native people vulnerable to abuse.

My mother was a very fashionable woman, and she accessorized outfits with lots of cool sunglasses—the large, dramatic kind that were popular when I was growing up. There were times, however, when my mom wore sunglasses less for sun protection than as a form of self-protection. Sometimes in the fall she wore them all day to hide eyes swollen from acute bouts of hay fever. Other times she wore them in an effort to hide the black eyes and swelling that came courtesy of my father’s fists.

My father was, at 6’4″ and very broad-shouldered, an intimidating man to many people and anytime he wanted to be. My mother was 5’6″, petite.

Watching the video of Ray Rice first punching and then dragging his then fiancée, Janay Rice (née Palmer), out of an elevator in Atlantic City brought me right back to a scene from my childhood when, hearing an argument escalate between my father and mother in another part of our home, I ran downstairs to see my father dragging my unconscious mother out of the spare bedroom. I went into what I can only call my “automatic” mode: I began beating my father with my then 10-year-old fists.

I am the oldest of four and the only girl in my natal family, part of what was then a very large extended family. In our “traditional” family, the men were supposed to be “in charge” (though the women held everything—and I mean everything—together), and they were supposed to go unchallenged no matter how wrong they were. For some reason, I was the only one who could and did stand up to my father without being beaten; my brothers on the other hand were not spared. As a result, and out of what I can only say was an inherent sense of injustice, I became my mother’s protector, a role I assumed (though I should not have had to) from the earliest time I can remember.

Being my mother’s protector meant laying awake at night after my father would come home late, waiting to hear if an argument would start and if I would have to jump in to prevent harm. It meant fearing for my mother any time I left home, whether it be to a sleepover at a friend’s house or to summer camp. It meant constant anxiety about what might happen to my mom. And it meant refusing opportunities—like a junior year abroad in college—for fear that if I did go, my mother might not be alive when I got back.

When my mother died in 1993 of what I was told was a massive heart attack, it was after a fight with my father in a restaurant, and after he made her get out of the car on a country road in the middle of winter. I never really found out what happened, though I tried incessantly to get more information from the police and from the emergency room. All I knew was that in the end I could not protect her.

My mother came from a family of extremely modest means, got married when she was 16, and had four children by the time she was 24. (She also had at least two miscarriages and one abortion.) Many times throughout my adolescence and early adulthood, I begged her to leave my father and get a divorce. “You are beautiful, smart, and strong,” I would tell her, “and you can make a life for yourself.” She refused, and I did not fully understand why until later: She was afraid of what my father would do to her, and for the safety of her kids.

She had no college degree, no job experience, and no personal wealth on which to fall back. She also knew no one would believe (or want to hear about) her abuse at the hands of my father. Too many people knew my father as the gregarious, generous guy who picked up people’s checks at restaurants, always dressed well, and (in their eyes) provided for his family. I know her fears were valid, because even after both parents had died, I could not discuss these details of my family’s past with my cousins—they either didn’t believe me, or they told me it “wasn’t my business to fix.” Nonetheless, this past followed me into adulthood in the form of severe depression that it took me years to conquer.

These early personal experiences, coupled with a career spent promoting women’s rights, make it clear to me that, in response to Ray Rice’s violence, the NFL has made and continues to make grave mistakes that are without question dangerous to Janay Rice and her daughter, as well as to countless other women and children.

In February, TMZ first released footage of Ray Rice dragging Janay out of the Atlantic City elevator. Both of them were arrested for supposedly attacking each other, though what attack Janay could have made on her fiancé with her bare hands that would have justified him punching her in the head and knocking her unconscious is beyond my comprehension.

In May, the Baltimore Ravens hosted a press conference featuring both Ray and Janay Rice, who had gotten married in the intervening months. Ray Rice begins the press conference by apologizing to everyone except his wife and speaks about “this situation” as though a piano had fallen on them out of the sky. He takes no real responsibility, and never utters the words “violence,” “assault,” or “attack.” Even more astounding (to some) is that later in the same press conference Janay Rice apologized for her “role” in “this incident,” a statement that sounds very much like something engineered by the NFL and the Ravens press teams, but one she may have believed, at least somewhat, since victims of violence are so often made to blame themselves.

The NFL first suspended Rice for two games for what NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell called a “horrible mistake,” and a flood of criticism ensued, against which Goodell defended himself and the league. Later, as the criticism of Goodell, the NFL, and the Ravens continued to pour in, Goodell admitted he had “not gotten it right the first time” and put in place a new policy that includes a six-game suspension for “first offenses” and a lifetime ban for a “second incident.”

This week, Rice’s contract was terminated and he was cut from the Ravens after an extended portion of the video from his attack on his fiancée was posted by TMZ—a video we have strong reason to believe NFL and Ravens officials had seen months earlier. Though this was Rice’s “first incident” (as far as we know), the public’s access to the video and the PR disaster that resulted was just too much for the NFL to handle. Ravens coach John Harbaugh said that seeing the video “made things a little bit different.” Really? How? Seeing a woman lying unconscious on a hotel lobby floor after being dragged like a rag doll from an elevator and then kicked as though she was an inanimate object (as depicted in video release in February) wasn’t enough to convince him that Ray Rice had committed a serious offense?

Goodell, Harbaugh, and the NFL writ large have put Janay Rice and countless other women in danger with their approach to Ray Rice’s abuse and their “protect the NFL at all costs” policies. I have seen no statement from the NFL that makes clear they understand that, no matter what information or videos are or are not leaked to the public, punching Janay Rice was unacceptable. Nor have I seen a statement from the NFL decrying the fact that she was arrested in conjunction with her own abuse.

Furthermore, they participated in helping Janay Rice become complicit in her own abuse, further underscoring their indifference and ignorance about intimate partner violence by including her in that grotesque stand-by-your-man press conference and tweeting out her apology from the Ravens Twitter account. (That tweet has since been deleted.) This behavior perpetuates the myth that somehow the victim “deserved” what happened to her (She lunged at him, didn’t she? She was arrested too, wasn’t she?), and exploits the personal blame that is so characteristic of victims and survivors of intimate partner abuse. It absolves the rest of us of any responsibility for taking action.

The NFL continues to only talk about Ray and Janay Rice as a couple, with no indication that they understand the danger that she, as an individual, may now be in. It is well recognized by researchers and domestic violence advocates that the most dangerous time for victims of intimate partner violence is when they try to leave, which is something my mother knew instinctively. The most dangerous time for Janay Rice may be right now, as she is living with a man whose mindset may well be that his career has just been cut short because of his wife.

Harbaugh said Monday, “I have nothing but hope and goodwill for Ray and Janay. And we’ll do whatever we can going forward to help them as they go forward and try to make the best of it.”

This help does not seem to include making clear that the NFL is placing Janay’s safety first. Harbaugh’s statement reinforces the notion that domestic abuse is a “private problem,” shared by both parties, in which they have equal culpability. At no point has the NFL assured us that anything is being done to provide for Janay’s safety. Nor has the league publicly expressed any understanding of what this episode and any ongoing abuse could do to the Rices’ young daughter. Leaving it up to Janay to “work things out” with a violent husband means that she is left alone in what may be an ongoing abusive relationship, with few places to turn.

And, despite a recent announcement of a more comprehensive approach to domestic violence within the NFL, I don’t have a great deal of confidence in the league going forward. In his announcement, Goodell promised:

[W]e will ensure that the NFL LifeLine and NFL Total Wellness Program are staffed with personnel trained to provide prompt and confidential assistance to anyone at risk of domestic violence or sexual assault — whether as a victim or potential aggressor. Information regarding these resources will be furnished to all NFL personnel and their families. Our Player Engagement Directors and Human Resource Executives will meet with team spouses and significant others to ensure that they are aware of the resources available to them as NFL family members, including the ability to seek confidential assistance through independent local resources, as well as through the club or the NFL Total Wellness Program. In this respect, we will utilize our existing, established telephone and on-line programs, and will communicate the full range of available services to all NFL personnel and their families.

Several things worry me about this new policy. For one, it puts the NFL in the role of self-policing, an approach that has proven to be a huge failure with regard to sexual assault and rape at universities and one that makes me deeply uncomfortable, given the NFL’s institutional imperative for good publicity and self-preservation. Second, it seems again to misunderstand how deeply manipulative, destructive, coercive, and dangerous abusers can be.

In addition, the NFL’s “second incident” approach to domestic violence places women in jeopardy, both now and in the future. Look at it this way: A football player abuses his partner, or anyone for that matter. This is bad PR for the league and the player, and it’s bad for the player’s pocketbook and career. So the victim does not report because she doesn’t want to be the one responsible for what happens after, perhaps even under threat of more violence. Let’s say, however, the abuse otherwise becomes public. The player is suspended. For that woman or any subsequent woman to seek help for further abuse (the “second incident”) means that again, in her abuser’s eyes, she would be responsible for his lifetime ban from the league. Is anyone doubtful about the kinds of coercion and threats that come into play here? Any intimate partner subject to current or future abuse and threats will almost certainly be less likely to come forward and report because the consequences for that victim may be more abuse or even death.

It is an untenable situation, and I am not sure of the ways around it, but I know this is not the answer. Why is even one incident of abuse OK?

One thing the NFL must begin to do is talk about the victims of domestic abuse as people who are indeed victims. They are not in “situations.” They did not “play a role” in their abuse. They have been attacked, violated, beaten, and demoralized, and their safety and the safety of their children is paramount.

Moreover, everyone in the NFL—every player, coach, front office administrator, public relations rep, and equipment manager—should have to undergo training in understanding, spotting, and supporting victims of intimate partner violence. Not the perpetrators, the victims.

And it’s time for the league to put its money where its mouth is. The NFL takes in billions of dollars every year as a not-for-profit—and therefore tax-exempt—organization, a situation that not only boggles my mind but stretches reality. (How does that work, IRS?) I would like to propose that the NFL put $100 million immediately—not in installments, not over time—into a fund to be administered by a coalition of domestic violence shelters and counseling centers throughout the country, the budgets of which have been slashed by governors in many states. I would further propose that a minimum of $25 million be donated to that account every year for the next ten years. The league can afford it, and victims of violence need it. That would be a real start.

]]>https://rewire.news/article/2014/09/09/nfls-domestic-violence-policy-dangerous/feed/0Jameis Winston, and the Overlapping of Football Culture and Rape Culturehttps://rewire.news/article/2013/11/27/jameis-winston-and-the-overlapping-of-football-culture-and-rape-culture/
https://rewire.news/article/2013/11/27/jameis-winston-and-the-overlapping-of-football-culture-and-rape-culture/#respondWed, 27 Nov 2013 13:44:46 +0000http://rhrealitycheck.org/?p=29055Florida State University star quarterback Jameis Winston was recently accused of raping a fellow student. Football culture clouds our ability to see him as anything other than a famous kid with amazing athletic skills, while rape culture demands that we mistrust the victim, question her credibility, and try to poke holes in her story.

Earlier this month, only a few days apart, the Tampa Bay Times and TMZ made public-records requests to the Tallahassee, Florida, police department. Both were looking for a police report filed nearly a year ago by a Florida State University (FSU) student who accused Jameis Winston—FSU’s star quarterback and the front-runner for college football’s top honor, the Heisman Trophy—of rape.

After TMZ broke the story, coverage quickly began focusing on the site’s credibility anda possible police cover-up, accompanied by every version of victim-blaming imaginable. Following positive DNA test results from the woman’s rape kit, which definitively linked Winston to her that night, the media boiled the case down to a typical he-said, she-said debate. Winston, through his attorney, now claims it was consensual sex. The victim’s family, in response, released a statement saying, “To be clear, the victim did not consent. This was a rape.”

FSU has more than 40,000 students in a city of less than 187,000. I attended the school from 1998 to 2002, and saw Tallahassee flooded during home football games; restaurant wait times were astronomical, and traffic was horrendous. It is not an exaggeration to say that on those weekends, football was life in that city.

This season, after a long drought of disappointing showings, FSU’s team has finally returned to the top of college football. Many credit Winston’s play and leadership as pivotal to the team’s current #2 ranking in the polls. As Stassa Edwards recently wrote on the Ms. Blog, Winston is seen as “more than a football player” in Tallahassee— “[h]e’s a hero or a saint.” Not only do the hopes and dreams of millions of fans rest on his throwing arm, quick legs, and ability to read a defense, but the economy of the city and the university do as well.

A single weekend when both FSU and its opponent are ranked in the top five, over $10 million flows into the city. (That number dips when the games are not as high-stakes.) In 2011, the football team alone generated $34 million in revenue, a significant portion of the $78 million that the entire athletic program brought in that year. When large athletic programs do well, applications increase and more students from out-of-state attend and pay higher tuition. Alabama is a great example of this. College football is big business.

It is no wonder that this particular case of a football player accused of rape has made headlines, monopolized large portions of SportsCenter’s coverage, and become yet another public referendum on the veracity of rape victims. (Spoiler alert: a lot of people assume the woman in this case is lying.)

It’s also very tempting to see this case as an isolated incident, so as not to have to question if there is a connection between the most popular and lucrative sport in this country and the rape culture that permeates so much of our lives. But as historyhasshownus, we know that not to be the case. Earlier this year, at the end of of the rape trial involving two Steubenville High School football players, Dave Zirin at The Nation wrote about why its important to interrogate where jock culture and rape culture overlap:

I am not asking if playing sports propels young men to rape. I am asking if the central features of men’s sports—hero worship, entitlement, and machismo—make incidents like Steubenville more likely to be replicated.

And they are replicated. Winston’s case isn’t even in isolation at FSU. In addition to Stassa Edwards, Adam Weinstein and Marci Robin have written pieces recently drawing attention to how football culture and rape culture both operate within Tallahassee and on FSU’s campus. On top of that, less than six months ago, in June 2013, FSU wide receiver Greg Dent was suspended indefinitely from the team after he was charged with second-degree sexual assault. In the coverage of the case against Winston, there is almost no mention of Dent.

Last year, in 2012, there were allegations against players at the University of Texas, Appalachian State University, and the U.S. Naval Academy. The Naval Academy trial is still ongoing. The U.S. military is dealing with issues of sexual assault across all of its branches, which has been major news recently due to federal legislation being debated in Congress. But the Naval Academy case from 2012 is very similar to a rape that occurred at the same school in 2001, the earlier one ending not in a trial but simply a dismissal of the accused from the academy. And the Appalachian State case is similar to one from 1997 at that school.

On the high school level, Steubenville has drawn attention to other cases, including one in Torrington, Connecticut, and, more famously, one in Maryville, Missouri, where the rape victim’s house was burned down in a likely act of intimidation by members of the community.

Sexual assault and violence against women are issues at the highest level of football: the National Football League. According to Forbes, the NFL is “the most lucrative [league] in the world,” with an annual revenue of $9 billion—it’s the ultimate money-maker. A 2011 Rewire article noted multiple rape cases involving NFL players, including one of the most well-known—that of alleged serial assaulter Ben Roethlisberger.

There is a reason I can rattle off these cases: The culture around (and therefore, the economy of) football today is dependent on a society that minimizes and/or ignores rape. College programs, in order to lure top players—who they are not allowed to pay—to their schools, stroke the players’ egos and present the fantasy that beautiful women will be their reward for living on their campus. Dave Zirin points out that the fact that players are “treated like gods by the adults who are supposed to be mentoring them” is a critical factor leading some men to expect others to simply do what they want. Yet, at the same time that they are being held up as gods by some, others see these players only as potential dollar signs. For those in charge of teams, departments, and leagues, football is all about using up bodies in such a way that they profit from them. The stripping away of the humanity of a potential rape victim by a rapist is similar in many ways—though not directly parallel—to the dehumanization that takes places when university administrators, team owners, and league commissioners commodify the bodies of these players.

I can imagine a football culture that does not work this way. It would involve including a lot more women in all kinds of roles within teams, university athletic departments, and league administrations. It would include mandatory annual rape prevention training focused on teaching consent and empathy for the victim. (That we don’t teach these things already was a takeaway from the Steubenville trial.) It would ban the use of college women in recruitment, and it would treat women as regular fans of football.

In the end, whether or not Jameis Winston is guilty, we know he is deeply invested in a football culture that is incredibly problematic, especially where it intersects with rape culture. Football culture clouds our ability to see him as anything other than a famous kid with a nice-guy persona and amazing athletic skills. Rape culture demands that we mistrust the victim, question her credibility, and try to poke holes in her story. It creates this familiar narrative in which people who have invested their own hopes and dreams in Winston claim his innocence immediately and refuse to hear anything else.

No matter what happens in the Winston case, I do know this: Money will continue to flow, and games will be won. Football will march on and over whatever bodies it must. And many will cheer it on as it does.

Welcome to our new Weekly Global Reproductive Justice Roundup! Each week, reporter Jessica Mack will summarize reproductive and sexual health and justice news from around the world. We will still report in depth on some of these stories, but we want to make sure you get a sense of the rest and the best.

In Egypt, Women’s Football V. ‘Virginity Tests’Sahar El-Hawary is North Africa’s first female referee, and is pioneering female football in Egypt. Al Jazeera profiled her story and work this month as part of their wonderful Africa on the Move series, which features uplifting stories from across the continent. The piece is beautifully done and well worth the watch. El-Hawary grew up with brothers and a father who were rabid football fans, and dreamed of playing and coaching herself. Two decades ago she began training a girls’ team in the secrecy of her own home, and today she has helped to set up girls teams in almost every region of the country. She recruits female players, coaches and referees, and in the process is helping undo a male-dominated sport and culture. Her son Omar helps manages the team. “Women can change the structure of societies in these areas,” she says. Here’s a video of one girls team playing back in 2007, which is pretty bad ass.

Meanwhile, women in Egypt are facing other setbacks. Last week a military court acquitted an army doctor accused of conducting forced “virginity tests” on female protesters last year. Activist Samira Ibrahim, who initially brought the charges, said the entire trial and resulting acquittal was “a joke, a theatre.” Ibrahim and other female detainees had alleged that military personnel sexually assaulted, harassed, and abused them in various grotesque ways – including “testing” to see whether they were virgins. (Let’s remember that penetration by any object without consent is rape, folks.) In response, one Army general deflected: “We didn’t want them to say we had sexually assaulted or raped them, so we wanted to prove that they weren’t virgins in the first place.” Wow, just wow. Via Al Jazeera and VOA.

Thank You, Condoms: South Africa’s New HIV/AIDS Infections Plummet South Africa, where 17 percent of adults ages 15 to 49 are HIV-positive, shoulders a heavy AIDS burden, but the rate of new infections in the country has dropped dramatically in the last decade. A study released last month suggests that this is largely due to increased condom use. In 2009, 75 percent of young South African men reported condom use at their last sexual encounter, compared to just 20 percent in 1999. It’s a significant revelation that such a simple and widely available tool can be so effective, given some setbacks and delays with other prevention options. Lack of condom use has been attributed to cultural attitudes toward masculinity, perceptions of promiscuity, and taboos about sex more broadly, but that is changing and national leadership on this issue has stepped way up. Remember when the Pope claimed that condoms would not help Africa’s AIDS crisis? Still a ways to go, but it’s looking like he was wrong. Via Economist.

A New Snapshot of (Positive) Sex Work in Thailand A new report by the Empower Foundation, a sex workers’ rights group in Thailand, offers a more nuanced picture of the country’s sex work industry – a well-developed, perhaps world-famous, and now increasingly legitimate sector for many. Hit & Run: Sex Workers’ Research on Anti-trafficking in Thailand is the result of a year-long survey implemented by sex workers among sex workers, to uncover the state of the industry. The report finds that sex workers are better off and better connected than many thought. Sex workers have access to hi-tech tools (e.g. smart phones) and use them to stay connected and safe; migration is part of the culture of sex work, and often helpful/voluntary (i.e. sex ‘trade’ not ‘trafficking’); and the average sex worker makes enough money to comfortably take care of his/her family. Of course it’s not positive all the time for everyone. But anti-trafficking groups and initiatives in Southeast Asia are a dime a dozen with many ineffective, oppressive, or all together useless. Everyone from Nicholas Kristof to Ashton Kutcher is trying to “save” girls and women and while these efforts may be well-meaning they tend to erase critical nuances in the issue and drown out the voices and agencies of sex workers themselves. “There are more women in the Thai sex industry being abused by anti-trafficking practices than there are women exploited by traffickers,” Empower director Chantawipa Apisuk said. Via Nation Multimedia.

Story on Genital Cutting in Liberia Draws Threats A Liberian journalist who published a piece on the persistence of female genital cutting in the Sande tradition this week has received threats to her wellbing. Mae Azango, a fellow for New Narratives and the Pulitzer Center, said that just days after her piece was published she received phone messages threatening to injure her for speaking out. Azango has not been sleeping at her house since. Signaling just how sensitive this issue is, Azango’s interview subject requested a pseudonym as protection for even speaking about her experience with the practice. As she point out, Liberia is one of five countries in Africa still holding on to the practice and little data exists to depict its magnitude. Other countries, including regional neighbor Senegal, have been open about the challenges in uprooting the practice but have become well-known for their rapid abandonment of the practice. It does beg the question though: why has this issue remained so rooted and clandestine in Liberia? Why, especially, when the country is under the tenure of Africa’s first female president (now in her second term) Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, who won a Nobel Peace Prize last year along with her country-woman (and fellow activist!) Leymah Gbowee. The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) yesterday issued a letter to President Johnson-Sirleaf requesting formal protection for Azango. Via CPJ.

Drama Series in Kenya Takes on Sexual Taboos

Shuga: Love, Sex, Money is a six-part drama series based in Nairobi, Kenya and looks pretty awesome. It’s racy, soap operatic, filled with good-looking and talented African actors, and meant to address persistent health and social taboos that have gone unaddressed for too long. A joint effort by MTV, the Partnership for an HIV-Free Generation, UNICEF and others, the series looks at rape, transactional sex, and other issues young people are navigating without many resources. It will be shown in 70 countries around the world. The series is also being used in youth HIV prevention and education programs, and has an accompanying toolkit to facilitate discussions and encourage status knowledge and testing. You can join discussions of “Shuga” online here. Via Humanosphere.

Welcome to our new Weekly Global Reproductive Justice Roundup! Each week, reporter Jessica Mack will summarize reproductive and sexual health and justice news from around the world. We will still report in depth on some of these stories, but we want to make sure you get a sense of the rest and the best.

USAID Launches New Gender Policy: Yes, And?

USAID has announced the launch of its new Policy on Gender Equality and Female Empowerment. The policy is driven in part by half-baked success to improve the lives of girls and women worldwide through international aid programs in recent years. The policy will direct foreign aid toward three goals: 1) empowering girls and women to realize their rights 2) reducing gender disparities in access to resources and 3) addressing gender-based violence. Secretary Clinton has been saying for years that women and girls are at the heart of US foreign policy, so either USAID is just not catching on, or wishful thinking is just now being turned into reality. About time: a recent report from the World Bank confirmed that women shoulder 66 percent of the world’s work, produce 50 percent of the food, earn 10 percent of the income, and own just one percent of land. Meanwhile, a report published by Pathways of Empowerment found that, in general, international donor policies have failed to effect any real change for women and girls worldwide. Approaching “women’s empowerment” as a monolithic goal, efforts have fallen short and given way to ‘empowerment light.’ Findings suggest that, instead, empowerment transpires in range of unexpected settings and activities, like watching TV and focusing on women’s sexual pleasure. Via DAWNS Digest.

Women Survive in a Fledgling South SudanSouth Sudan is the world’s youngest country. It seemed to have an OK go of it after gaining independence last July, but has become almost completely embroiled in conflict since then. Women face dire health circumstances and escalated risks of sexualized violence. At the country’s inception, women had a unique window to assert their equal rights and influence over the nation’s future, but it’s soon closing. Women’s groups continue to organize for their inclusion, voice, and empowerment, but the broader country-wide conflict may consume their good intentions. This is a critical junction for women in South Sudan, and they need all the support and awareness they can get – some think they could hold the nation’s promise of peace. Via Channel 16.

FIFA Tests ‘Sport Hijab’ for Muslim Female Football PlayersIn response to pressure from the United Nations and the Prince of Jordan, among others, FIFA, the international football federation, has agreed to consider overturning its hijab ban for female players. Long sleeves and leggings are allowed for modesty reasons, but FIFA has claimed that the wearing of a head scarf is a safety issue on the field, since it is normally held in place with pins. Last year, the Iranian women’s football team was disqualified from an Olympics qualifying match because of their dress. Now, a scarf held with Velcro will be tested as an alternative. The Prince of Jordan, who is also a FIFA VP, has called it a matter of culture, not religion, that women should be allowed to wear the garment. Perhaps lifting the ban would help persuade Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Brunei to field women’s teams for the upcoming Olympics? Via Religious News Service.

Unsafe Abortion Persists in Nepal, Despite Liberal LawAn in-depth report says unsafe abortion is still rampant in Nepal, ten years after the abortion law was amended to be one of the more progressive in the world, available to women under nearly any circumstance through the first and sometimes second trimesters. A 2009 Supreme Court decision affirmed that legal abortion in Nepal must be accessible and affordable to all women. Knowledge that abortion can be procured safely, legally, and cheaply – in government hospitals, no less – is unfortunately scant countrywide, owing in part to large remote swaths and difficult terrain. Also serving as a stumbling block to safe and legal abortion is USAID policies and officials. A 2009 report from the rights group Ipas found that The Helms Amendment, which prevents funding of abortion, was being applied as an all-out abortion ban and generated misconceptions among providers and women.

]]>Focus On The Family Tebows The Playoffshttps://rewire.news/article/2012/01/16/focus-on-family-tebows-playoffs/
Mon, 16 Jan 2012 05:53:24 +0000The Broncos lose to the Patriots. Does that mean God didn't like His new ad?

]]>Focus on the Family’s newest football ad may not have had the same…impact…as when quarterback Tim Tebow tackled his mom during the Super Bowl, but that hasn’t stopped the group from continuing to try and cash in on the devout athlete or turn the sport into a political one.